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When Real Estate Becomes a National Security Asset: What the Florida Spy Story Means for Developers

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​ By Daniel Kaufman | March 2026 I spend a lot of time thinking about what drives real estate demand, population shifts, employment anchors, infrastructure investment, interest rate cycles. But I’ll admit, foreign espionage operations aren’t usually in my underwriting model. They probably should be. Vanity Fair recently published a sweeping investigation into what it’s calling “Spylandia” a stretch of Florida’s Space Coast that has quietly become one of the most active corridors for Chinese and Russian intelligence operations in the United States. The piece details drone overflights of Kennedy Space Center, recruitment of SpaceX engineers at local bars, and the part that caught my attention as a developer — strategic real estate acquisitions near Patrick Space Force Base. Let me sit with that for a second. Real estate as an intelligence platform. Houses and rental units purchased specifically to surveil one of the most sensitive military and commercial space installations on the planet...
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Prosperity Isn’t Where the Media Says It Is (And It’s Not Where They Say It Isn’t)

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​ By Daniel Kaufman  If you listen to the national media long enough, you would think America’s major legacy cities are collapsing, everyone is fleeing the coasts, and the only smart real estate investment is somewhere in the Sunbelt. As a real estate developer and investor who actually studies long-term fundamentals instead of headlines, I can tell you the reality is far more nuanced — and far more interesting. A new framework called the Geography of Prosperity Index, created by Bradley Schurman and Jaymes Cloninger, attempts to measure something most rankings miss: long-term civic viability, not just short-term economics. That distinction matters. Too much real estate analysis today is driven by lagging indicators like last year’s population migration numbers, temporary interest rate impacts, or political narratives. Serious investors look at durability — not noise. And the results of this study challenge a lot of the simplistic narratives dominating real estate c...
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